David Kolb

Frederick Neuhouser’s The Foundations of Hegel’s Social Theory expertly answers many standard objections to Hegel’s theory, and offers a careful reading of its basic principles. However, questions remain whether Neuhouser can successfully reconstruct Hegel’s theory while avoiding its links to Hegel’s logic. Hegel’s normative conclusions depend on logical principles about the self that are not adequately translated into Neuhouser’s normative and consequentialist arguments. Frederick Neuhouser’s book on Hegel’s social theory is filled with exciting arguments, perceptive analyses, and deft textual interpretations. Neuhouser succeeds in avoiding many of “the common mistaken (and unattractive) readings” (93) of Hegel’s social theory. His overall tone is irenic rather than polemical. Opposed views are given their due and treated with respect. Neuhouser poses and reposes objections to Hegel’s theory to make them as strong as possible before replying to them. His expositions, defense, and partial revision of Hegel are carefully reasoned and should put to rest many of the standard objections. Throughout, Hegel’s theories are read in ways congenial to contemporary American philosophical concerns about normativit y and communit y. Historical connections with Rousseau are joined to the more commonly cited connections with Kant. The key point taken over and extended from Rousseau is that individual members must possess general wills (48), and this is the special good realized in an ethical communit y. Hegel is defended as having a much more nuanced view of the relation of the individual and the social whole than critics imagine. In his expert and effective chapter six (“Hegel’s Social Theory and Methodological Atomism”), Neuhouser shows that Hegel fails to see that a methodological individualist can find associa16 The Owl of Minerva 36:1 (2003–04) tion to be a value in itself, and that Hegel’s opposition to social contract theories nonetheless brings him closer to some liberal individualist theses than commonly thought. Neuhouser wants to clarify and argue for Hegel’s conception of social freedom. Hegel distinguishes three types of freedom in society. All of them concretize the notion of freedom as self-determination. They match the three large divisions of the Philosophy of Right: the freedom of the person to follow their arbitrarily given desires (abstract right), the freedom of individuals to determine their will according to self-legislated principles (morality), and the social freedom of the citizen within the organic social and political whole (Sittlichkeit). Neuhouser avoids positioning Hegel at either extreme of the debate between liberals and communitarians. Individualit y and membership do not have to be competing values; properly understood, each enables the other. Hegel will not choose; instead he attempts to combine the need for membership with the moral dignit y of the individual. Neuhouser argues effectively against reading Hegel as accepting the “my station and its duties” view of the relation of the individual and the state, but Hegel also avoids the usual opposite pole of making individual interests the key to all social normativit y. In his exegesis and argumentation Neuhouser insists that he need not rely on the “metaphysical” parts of Hegel’s system. It is “easier than is commonly thought” to make Hegel’s social points “without involving his unique metaphysical views” (23). Indeed, Neuhouser claims that the establishment of the rationalit y and normative superiorit y of modern political institutions must be prior to the overall claims of the system that realit y is rational through and through. Contrary to what is usually assumed, Hegel’s argument that the modern social order is essentially rational is, in one important sense, logically prior to his grander claim that reason (or God) pervades all of realit y. For establishing the latter view depends, in part, on being able to show first that the social order, as one piece of all realit y, is rational. (271) This seems puzzling from the point of view of Hegel’s system, which tries to establish its basic structures without reliance on empirical surveys. Hegel works from the already established set of categories and conceptual motions found in the logic. These guide his empirical investigations. (See, for example, §4 of the Philosophy of Right.) Hegel might agree that establishing the rationalit y of realit y in general does imply an already established rationalit y to social and political institutions, but the mode of establishing that social rationalit y does not begin with discussions in the field of social theory. The logic plays The Spectre of Formal Universalit y 17 the prior role, in that the rationalit y of any concrete sphere of realit y follows upon the logical claims about the movements and structures of thought. Still, Neuhouser is right to say that Hegel’s work can be useful within the discourse of social and political theory without…

ion To see this more clearly, consider the word that’s been behind much of my description so far: “abstract.” In its ordinary use, “abstract” designates concepts and ideas as opposed to the “concrete” entities they describe. All concepts are abstract in this sense, but we also say that some are more abstract than others, because they include less and less of the individual they are describing and apply equally to larger and larger groups of entities. For instance, there is Bossie, my cow, but “cow” describes lots of animals, and “animal” even more, and “living thing” still more. The concepts say less and less about more and more entities. Hegel offers revised notions of the abstract and concrete, but for our purposes here we can refer to a simpler part of his complex theory. What is distinctive is that he can refer to actions and practices and institutions as abstract, as well as the concepts they work from. In a small document which was discovered among his papers, and was probably...

Arakawa and Gins have been fomenting revolution for a long time. In the last twenty years their attention has turned more and more towards architecture and urban planning as a way of reforming our bodily existence. Their proposals enter daily life rather than staying in the isolated sphere of the museum or gallery. These constructions are to be lived in, not contemplated. Will daily life then blunt or sharpen Arakawa and Gins’s power to educate and revise our “architectural bodies”?

The old spiritual masters told us to be in the world but not of it. We moderns have given this a secular twist. We are in our world — we have values, ways of life, world pictures — but not of it — we are to be aware of our freedom, aware of the contingency of our world and its dependence on factors many of which are or will be under our control. We both inhabit our world and enjoy the status of distanced controllers. Or, if our lack of control and our dependence on historical and social factors is being emphasized, we are to inhabit our world with a certain knowing irony, since we understand the process by which it came about, even if we cannot change it. We hnave found ways to institutionalize this split-level identity.

In the popular press and the halls of politics, controversies over evolution are increasingly strident these days. Hegel is relevant in this connection, even though he rejected the theories of evolution he knew about, because he wants rational understanding and a larger process to comprehend natural processes and their history, but without any claims for intelligent design. The way current debates get publicised, there appear to be two extreme positions. The first is a reductionist materialism: all complex systems are describable purely in terms of the qualities of their most basic components, and the systems themselves result from Darwinian selection. No teleological concepts at all need be applied. At the other extreme is total teleology; all systems and their interactions and development are the result of preconceived conscious purposeful design by a powerful designer. The ontological status of the designer is usually filled out with theological notions.

A friend once said to me that he would be glad to discuss postmodemity if only he knew what modernity meant. There are so many descriptions. We're all modern: Modern society, modern art, modern philosophy, modern science, modern technologies. The reformation, the wars of religion, the American revolution, the French revolution, the Paris Commune, the world wars. Civil society, capitalism, the liberal state, the procedural state. Luther, Galileo, Descartes, Locke, Kant, Manet, Cézanne, Rawls, Warhol. But also Novalis, Nietzsche, Heidegger and the German cultural conservatives. Derrida, Bataille, Levinas, Pynchon. And so forth.Here is Robert Pippin's enumeration of what he sees as the common features of modern societies:The new conception of nature required by modern science; the post-Cartesian notion of mind as subjective consciousness; a political world of passion-driven but rationally calculating individuals, or a “post-Protestant” world of individually self-reliant, respon...

The philosopher G.W.F. Hegel (1771-1831) is now recognized to be one of the most important modern thinkers. His influence is to be found in Marx's conception of historical dialectic, Kierkegaard's existentialism, Dewey's pragmatism and Gadamer's hermeneutics and Derrida's deconstruction. Until now, however, it has been difficult for the non-specialist to find a reasonably comprehensive introduction to this important, yet at times almost impenetrable philosopher. With this book Stephen Houlgate offers just such an introduction. His book is written in an accessible style and covers a range of topics: the philosophy of history, logic and phenomenology, political philosophy, aesthetics and the philosophy of religion. In the course of the book the author relates Hegel's ideas to those of many other thinkers, including Luther, Descartes, Kant and Thomas Kuhn. This book should be of interest to students and teachers of continental philosophy and history of philosophy.

This multiplication is based on accepted types of drama. Any set of social or artistic or behavioral norms can generate new types by combining the old. We have rock, rap, country music, country-rock, and could have country-rap. But changes can go far beyond this, providing new types to be combined and new modes of combination. Goethe's Faust is none of the player king's types, and then Beckett invents more. Impressionists and post-impressionists did not just add to the genres of painting; they changed the goals and practices of painting so that older genres were redefined in the new context. Modern capitalism and representative democracy brought new modes of social individuation, new kinds of associations, new dimensions of combination and mutation. The whole space of possible actions was reconfigured.

Anyone who labours at presenting anew an independent structure of philosophical science may . . . be reminded of the story that Plato revised his Republic seven times over. . . . However, the author, in face of the magnitude of the task, has had to content himself with what was possible to achieve . . . even under the doubt whether the noisy clamour of current affairs . . . leave any room for participation in the passionless calm of a knowledge which is in the element of pure thought alone. (SL 42/21:21)1

Contents Preface xi 1. The Modern World 1 Traditional versus Modern Identity 3 Descriptions of Modernity 7 Max Weber 9 Formal Rationality 11 Other Signs of Modernity 17 2. Hegel's Criticisms of Civil Society 20 Civil Society 22 Mutual Recognition 23 Freedom and the Novelty of ...